A wide range of coin-, banknote- or card-operated automatic dispensing machines are known to exist in the state of the art.
Said machines have a glazed front part displaying the different products, generally food products, which are disposed in several compartments of a plurality of storage trays, said product storage compartments being oriented towards the front of the machine so as to allow the user to see the variety of products to be dispensed by selecting the desired product from among these.
There are dispensing machines of this type where the selected product falls by gravity from the corresponding storage compartment towards a collection tray located on the lower part of the machine.
There are other dispensing machines, such as that described in Spanish patent ES2277532 B2 relating to an “advertising device for dispensing machines” from the same applicant as the present patent application, which is based on a dispensing machine having a glazed front part and a plurality of trays wherein the products are stored in a series of compartments and a tray for receiving the dispensed product formed by an ascending/descending body by way of an elevator, with regard to the inner side of the glazed front part.
Therefore, when the user selects a product, the ascending/descending body is firstly positioned with regard to the corresponding tray in order to receive the respective product and be directed towards the collection box.
In the earlier machine, additional elements for transporting the products from the elevator to the collection box must be included, thereby reducing the useful space of the machine available for storing products.
In earlier machines, even in the event that the product collection box were disposed inside the elevator, the product collection door would be disposed at the same height as said box or front space in the front part of the elevator for extracting the products, due to which the height of the products to be extracted would be proportional to the height of the product collection door.
In order to dispense products of greater height, the dimensions of both the collection door and the front space disposed in the front of the elevator to extract the products and, therefore, that of the elevator itself must be increased, thereby reducing the height of the machine that would be destined for housing trays containing products, decreasing the capacity thereof.
The dispensing machine of the present invention resolves all the aforementioned drawbacks, as it has a configuration wherein an increase in the height of the products to be dispensed does not represent a decrease in the height of the machine destined for housing trays containing products.